Now, Facebook are improving their AR Studio by adding tracking capabilities. This will work by using the camera on your phone to track your surroundings and open an AR experience from there. For example, a logo, barcode, or image in the real world will be picked up by your camera, to prompt an experience in the augmented world.

Cool huh? I think so. Facebook has spoken about how they “believe in the not-so-distant future, AR will be in the world all around us”, and I agree with them. What’s interesting about Facebook’s exploration into AR, is that they’re opening up the creation process to all users, and are making it so that even people with “little to no technical background” can have the ability to create AR experiences. How these experiences will be distributed and ranked however is another question entirely…

Twitter trials breaking news module in timelines

How much news do you discover through Twitter? You probably pick up more than you realise from the social network, especially if you ever find yourself browsing the Moments tab.

Twitter are now trialing a new breaking news module which appears at the top of your timeline. That means no switching tabs, it’s just there for you to see immediately. The breaking news card will take you to a short summary of the story and tweets from different sources who are currently tweeting about that particular news story.

This is currently being curated by humans, a good choice if you ask me, to ensure that the Stories are being covered correctly, and to help avoid any “fake news” issues, but they do aim to automate this in the future.

That’s all for this week! Make sure you’re following us on Twitter @basecreative for regular updates.